We felt the frustration of ‘great on paper, ignored in practice.’ So we fixed it.
While processes make sense for owners and managers, they rarely make sense for the frontline people doing the work. They see processes as abstract representations of how others think they work.
How can we align the interests of senior management and regular staff? This is what we set out to find out.
Here’s our story…
How it started
Back in 2005 Gluu’s founder and CEO, Søren Pommer, was responsible for Philips’ global digital projects from its Amsterdam HQ. To raise the digital maturity of the company a global network of ‘Country Internet Managers’ was approved by the company’s Board of Management. Søren led the effort to define organizational roles, KPIs, supporting processes, and systems. It was about hiring the right people and then establish a common way of working so that they could exchange best practices across countries. The approach was highly successful and nominated with two internal awards.The following button can be deleted, you can add it to invite the visitor to dive further into the page.
Realizing the Broken System
After this Søren went back to Copenhagen to become the COO of a digital agency. With about 50 employees and ambitious growth plans it was Søren’s job to streamline operations and make the agency scalable. This required common ways of working and an ERP system. However, he soon realized that creative agencies and business processes mix like oil and water. So during these months, Søren started to have doubts about some of the work he and his team did back in Philips:
He realized that the normal way of large, systems-driven and top-down process governance implementations was broken. To succeed with winning the hearts and minds of the people that actually do the work a new way forward was badly needed. It should…
- involve the people that knew best
- ensure that work instructions were updated continuously to reflect their actual, practical learning
- increase clarity and transparency of how work flowed across silos
- save time and make work easier by turning processes into helpful guides and ensuring that compliance reporting became a byproduct of simply following the processes.
Søren Pommer
“If a process has 15 activities and only 5 of these connect to IT systems then how can we know that it is executed?
Could it could be that some employees don’t understand, or agree with, the process and only ‘check boxes’ to make bosses happy?”
From Vision to Reality
This new way forward required new software. A platform that would work without the need to change any systems and was so user-friendly that anybody could work with making processes easier to Understand, Orchestrate and Improve.
In 2011 Søren founded Gluu and the team has spent nine years working with more than 500 managers and process owners to find the sweet spot between speed and control, when it comes to common ways of working and compliance work.
Today Gluu helps more than one hundred businesses and thousands of users in almost 60 countries to collaborate around business processes. The journey continues and every day we take one more step towards realizing the founding vision.